Boing Boing » fontshttp://boingboing.net
Brain candy for Happy MutantsSun, 02 Aug 2015 13:00:55 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.2Why Impact is the "meme font"http://boingboing.net/2015/07/27/why-impact-is-the-meme-font.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/07/27/why-impact-is-the-meme-font.html#commentsMon, 27 Jul 2015 12:11:08 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=409075the meme font had itself become a meme."]]>
Vox explains how the stout 1965 typeface became the text of choice for internet silliness: because is was included with Windows, and by the time anyone had a choice, "the meme font had itself become a meme."]]>http://boingboing.net/2015/07/27/why-impact-is-the-meme-font.html/feed0Font censors you as you typehttp://boingboing.net/2015/07/23/font-censors-self-as-you-type.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/07/23/font-censors-self-as-you-type.html#commentsThu, 23 Jul 2015 15:16:06 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=408182Emil Kozole created Seen, a font that cleverly redacts certain words as you type—a clever automatic ligature hack. It comes in three cuts, with varying degrees of censorship.]]>

Emil Kozole created Seen, a font that cleverly redacts certain words as you type—a clever automatic ligature hack. It comes in three cuts, with varying degrees of censorship.

Seen is a font that has a preloaded set of sensitive “spook words” that the NSA and other agencies are using to scan through our documents. The typeface can be used in any popular software such as Illustrator, Indesign, Word or in a browser. It is used normally to write text, but once one of the words on the “list” is written - the font automatically crosses it out. Therefore giving you an overview of your text and highlighting where you are potentially prone to being surveilled. It gets its name by a Facebook action that happens when the other user reads the message.

See also: Christian Naths' Redacted Script, where every character is the same block or squiggle, designed to resemble redacted documents. Designers like them for making placeholder text genuinely abstract. And then there's the Doctors' Typeface.
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Fun fact from the film: Lane says we call it a type face because a physical piece of type has a foot, a body, a shoulder, and a face. The face is the only part that gets pressed into the paper.

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http://boingboing.net/2015/01/22/beautiful-short-documentary-on.html/feed0Landscape alphabet (c.1818-1860)http://boingboing.net/2014/02/11/landscape-alphabet-c-1818-186.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/02/11/landscape-alphabet-c-1818-186.html#commentsTue, 11 Feb 2014 17:48:04 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=286885
In the 19th century, Charles Joseph Hullmandel illustrated a glorious series of landscapes shaped as the letters of the English alphabet.]]>

In the 19th century, Charles Joseph Hullmandel illustrated a glorious series of landscapes shaped as the letters of the English alphabet. You can see them all in the British Museum's online collection: The Landscape Alphabet(via Juxtapoz)]]>

http://boingboing.net/2014/02/11/landscape-alphabet-c-1818-186.html/feed0Creating a font from a classic comichttp://boingboing.net/2014/01/30/creatingafont.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/01/30/creatingafont.html#commentsThu, 30 Jan 2014 19:50:41 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=283897Elfquest—just in time to begin lettering the comic series' conclusive installment.]]>

Creating a font from a classic comic

Typographer Nate Piekos describes how he created a 21st-century typeface from a 1980 issue of Elfquest—just in time to begin lettering the comic series' conclusive installment.

I remember asking my mother to get me the collected Elfquest trade paperbacks for Christmas one year. Weeks went by, and being a nosy kid, I stumbled upon them, concealed in the back of a closet just before the big holiday. Giddy with anticipation, I told no one. I bided my time ...

Wendy and Richard Pini's epic tales got me through junior high and beyond. I carted those trade paperbacks with me when I left my mom's house, went to design school, started a career in comics, got married ... and moved a half dozen times in between.

Fast-forward to just a few months ago. Editor Sierra Hahn told me new Elfquest comics were coming to Dark Horse and asked if I was interested in not only designing Wendy's hand-lettering font, but if I'd also like to take on the lettering duties of the whole series! I couldn't reply fast enough. Of course I was interested! It was one of those surreal full-circle moments when I get to work with some of my comic book heroes. I immediately broke out those faded, dog-eared Elfquest collections for reference, and they sat on my desk the entire time I worked on Wendy's typeface.

I've designed hundreds of fonts, but designing the definitive typeface of Wendy's classic hand lettering was a pretty big deal to me. It had to capture the essence of the original Elfquest, it had to be top-notch software, and it had to be special.

Wendy Pini's lettering from Issue #9 of Elfquest

Here's how I did it

Wendy picked out what she considered her best hand lettering-a selection of pages from Elfquest #9. And Dark Horse provided me with high resolution scans of all the pages. My first task was to study the letters in Photoshop, make an intimate analysis of the style as a whole, and choose the characters I thought were most representative.

Every hand letterer brings unique qualities to the page. Some are slight, others overt, like the wiggle on the bottom of Wendy's L's!

Once I had enough characters picked out to work with, I brought the art into Adobe Illustrator and began creating vector objects of each character. Many typographers would autotrace these, but I always create the objects point by point. The time invested is hours versus seconds, but the results are far superior.

Obviously, there are a lot of characters on your keyboard that don't show up very often, or at all, in comic book lettering. But it's important to me that a finished font contain these things—brackets, a plus sign, accents, etc. It's a matter of craftsmanship and pride in the end product. You could drive a fancy car just fine without a paint job, but it just wouldn't seem finished, would it? Many of these lesser-used characters were missing from Wendy's samples, but the Pinis gave me permission to invent the missing pieces, mimicking Wendy's style. In the end, I think I did a pretty seamless job.

Piekos traces and adjusts the letterforms manually, avoiding use of automated tools available in applications such as Adobe Illustrator

At least two versions of each letter were created, so later on, when I moved the project over to Fontlab, I could program Open Type autoligatures for any instance when two of the same letter appeared side by side. (Think of the two o's in the word book.) The autoligatures swap one letter out so that they're slightly different in appearance, creating a more organic look.

The art contained fewer samples of bold and italic lettering, which are used less often than regular text, so I needed to search a larger number of Wendy's art pages to get what I needed. I repeated the same process of checking off my top choices of which letters to create as point-bypoint vectors. Characters that I couldn't find in the art were once again designed from scratch, simulating Wendy's style. Over the course of about a week, I had re-created or simulated everything I needed.

I decided the italic style would be created by slanting the regular characters in Fontlab, so I took some measurements of Wendy's natural italic slant. You may imagine some very technical equation for figuring this out, or even some preprogrammed action in Illustrator, and those things probably exist, but taking the simplest approach, I just back-slanted some samples of Wendy's italic letters with Illustrator's Shear tool until they were nearly vertical. This gave me a measurement of 30°-35°. I made a note for later and moved on to tidying up the vectors that I'd made.

The completed typeface

As my work progressed, I'd send regular previews to Sierra and the Pinis, getting feedback and making adjustments. The Pinis decided to dial back the degree of slant on both the italic and bold italic sets-we ended up at a 24° slant-and reduce the weight of the bold italic a bit. Here are the samples I submitted to the Pinis for final approval before moving everything over to Fontlab.

A font finally becomes a working piece of software once it's been programmed. This happens in Fontlab or similar software, and it's when things begin to get very technical, but don't worry—I'm just going to hit the highlights!

The most important process at this stage is kerning (how any two characters fit together). Imagine a letter T next to an A. They have to scoot together to look right within a word.

Over the last decade, I've assembled a proprietary list of over eleven thousand kerning pairs that I check and adjust for every font I create. The process can take anywhere from hours to days and is the true measure of a professionally made font.

Careful adjustment of distances between specific pairs of letters — kerning — is a time-consuming process essential to a high-quality typeface.

Each typeface also needs to be cleaned up one final time, spaced, and hinted (the process of making characters render properly onscreen), and the Open Type autoligatures must be programmed.

After much work, the software was saved as installable font files and approved by the Pinis. As I remember it, we made barely any changes at this point. (Always good news!) The font Richard and Wendy decided to call "Elfquest" was finished, and it was about to get a trial by fire!

Dark Horse was going to print the Final Quest Special issue that the Pinis had already completed. But first it needed to be relettered with the new font to match the style of upcoming issues. So within a day or two of finishing, I was hard at work using the new typeface and developing a style guide that evoked those classic tales I grew up with while bringing a fresh, uniform aesthetic to the series' lettering.

If the lettering didn't really jump out at you in this comic, I'll take that as a compliment. When comic lettering is done well, by a letterer with a love of typography and graphic design, it's unobtrusive to the reader and complements the art. When it's done poorly, it's a distraction, and worse yet, it makes your reading experience difficult. It's a serious business to me.

That said, if you did enjoy the lettering in Elfquest: The Final Quest half as much as I enjoyed designing it ... well ... I guess we both have my mom to thank!

✦ Nate Piekos graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Design from Rhode Island College in 1998. Since founding Blambot, he has created some of the industry's most popular fonts and has used them to letter comic books for Marvel Comics, DC Comics, Oni Press, and Dark Horse Comics, as well as dozens of independent publishers. In 2001 he became type designer to Harvey Award Winner, Mike "Madman" Allred, and has had his designs licensed by such companies as Microsoft, Six Flags Amusement Parks, New Yorker Magazine, The Gap, and many more. Nate's work has not only been utilized in comics, but in video games, on television, and in feature films as well. When not designing, Nate is committed to a regular fitness routine, reads voraciously, writes and illustrates webcomics, and is a dedicated musician. He's married and lives in New England.

]]>http://boingboing.net/2014/01/30/creatingafont.html/feed0Hoefler vs Frere-Joneshttp://boingboing.net/2014/01/17/hoefler-vs-frere-jones.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/01/17/hoefler-vs-frere-jones.html#commentsFri, 17 Jan 2014 16:35:33 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=280960The most famous contemporary typeface designers are at legal loggerheads over ownership of their foundry, Hoefler & Frere-Jones. [Fast Co Design]]]>The most famous contemporary typeface designers are at legal loggerheads over ownership of their foundry, Hoefler & Frere-Jones. [Fast Co Design]]]>http://boingboing.net/2014/01/17/hoefler-vs-frere-jones.html/feed0The most popular coding fontshttp://boingboing.net/2013/09/10/the-most-popular-coding-fonts.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/09/10/the-most-popular-coding-fonts.html#commentsTue, 10 Sep 2013 14:27:03 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=254942the most popular monospace fonts good for cranking code. Adobe's Source Code Pro is top of the pile, but Consolas is only a couple of votes off.]]>the most popular monospace fonts good for cranking code. Adobe's Source Code Pro is top of the pile, but Consolas is only a couple of votes off. My favorite? Orator 10 (not Orator Std), an oldie from the Selectric days. [via HN]]]>http://boingboing.net/2013/09/10/the-most-popular-coding-fonts.html/feed0Practical Typographyhttp://boingboing.net/2013/07/24/practical-typography.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/07/24/practical-typography.html#commentsWed, 24 Jul 2013 15:25:05 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=244982Practical Typography, a splendid introduction to practical typography. If you enjoy it, he suggests buying one of his fonts.]]>Practical Typography, a splendid introduction to practical typography. If you enjoy it, he suggests buying one of his fonts. You've heard the name before: his last work was Typography for Lawyers, an excellent guide to typography for lawyers.]]>http://boingboing.net/2013/07/24/practical-typography.html/feed0Courier Primehttp://boingboing.net/2013/01/30/courier-prime.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/01/30/courier-prime.html#commentsWed, 30 Jan 2013 18:58:58 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=209660Courier Prime is a new version of IBM's classic public domain typeface, redesigned by Quote-Unquote Apps to look good in print and on-screen.]]>@font-face {font-family: 'Courier Prime'; src: url(http://boingboing.net/features/courierprime.ttf) format('ttf');}

Courier Prime is a new version of IBM's classic public domain typeface, redesigned by Quote-Unquote Apps to look good in print and on-screen. I'm a big fan of the original, whose legendary legibility was hampered by pixelation until "retina" displays came along--so it seems due a comeback!

To my eye, many existing monospaced font suffer from one of three problems. The first problem that I often notice is that, many monospaced fonts force lowercase letters with a very large x-height into a single width, resulting in overly condensed letter forms which result in words and text with a monotonous rhythm, which quickly becomes tedious for human eyes to process. The second problem is somewhat the opposite of the first: many monospaced fonts have lowercase letters that leave too much space in between letters, causing words and strings to not hold together. Lastly, there is a category of monospaced fonts whose details I find to be too fussy to really work well in coding applications where a programmer doesn’t want to be distracted by such things.

FF Chartwell, designed by Travis Kochel, is a typeface that represents sequences of numbers graphically.

Driven by the frustration of creating graphs within design applications (primarily Adobe Creative Suite) and inspired by typefaces such as FF Beowolf and ­­FF PicLig, Travis saw an opportunity to take advantage of OpenType technology to simplify the process.

]]>

FF Chartwell, designed by Travis Kochel, is a typeface that represents sequences of numbers graphically.

Driven by the frustration of creating graphs within design applications (primarily Adobe Creative Suite) and inspired by typefaces such as FF Beowolf and ­­FF PicLig, Travis saw an opportunity to take advantage of OpenType technology to simplify the process.

Chartwell is a more ambitious project than either, and comes in 7 different "weights", each producing a different kind of graph. $130 for the lot, they're $25 each if, say, you only like pies. A web version is under development.

http://boingboing.net/2012/08/22/chartwell-font-turns-numbers-i.html/feed21Hrii Cthulhu, Goka Font Ph'nglui!http://boingboing.net/2012/06/11/hrii-cthulhu-goka-font-phng.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/06/11/hrii-cthulhu-goka-font-phng.html#commentsMon, 11 Jun 2012 07:50:20 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=165563Do you love nameless, creeping horrors in the deep? Unnaturally! Do you love fonts? Of course, you do. Thomas Phinney, a veteran type designer, is attempting an unholy union of the two by resurrecting the moldering corpse of three typefaces: Columbus, Columbus Initials, and American Italic.]]>Do you love nameless, creeping horrors in the deep? Unnaturally! Do you love fonts? Of course, you do. Thomas Phinney, a veteran type designer, is attempting an unholy union of the two by resurrecting the moldering corpse of three typefaces: Columbus, Columbus Initials, and American Italic. Columbus was used for all the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, in which Phinney played a hand (severed?), designing clues for "Masks of Nyarlathotep."

Back the project on Kickstarter for Phinney to create Cristoforo, modern renditions of these three fonts. Pledges at all but the lowest level come with licenses to use the fonts. Phinney's original work is terrific, and I have no doubt that he'll bring a sensitive hand to re-creating these classic faces.]]>http://boingboing.net/2012/06/11/hrii-cthulhu-goka-font-phng.html/feed6Frustro, the impossible typefacehttp://boingboing.net/2012/04/05/frustro-the-impossible-typefa.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/04/05/frustro-the-impossible-typefa.html#commentsThu, 05 Apr 2012 14:58:36 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=153078
Inspired by impossible objects a la Reutersvärd, Escher and Penrose, designer Martzi Hegedus created Frustro, a mind-bending typeface. [via Illusion 360]]]>Inspired by impossible objects a la Reutersvärd, Escher and Penrose, designer Martzi Hegedus created Frustro, a mind-bending typeface. [via Illusion 360]]]>http://boingboing.net/2012/04/05/frustro-the-impossible-typefa.html/feed4Domo Arigato, Mr Robotohttp://boingboing.net/2012/01/02/roboto.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/01/02/roboto.html#commentsMon, 02 Jan 2012 20:24:33 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=136768the clearer its virtues become. ]]>

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto

“I can’t wake up one morning and say, ‘Screw the letter B,’” type designer Matthew Carter told me last year when I interviewed him for the Economist, just after he had received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellowship. Carter, arguably the leading living creator and adapter of fonts in the Western world, was talking about the limits of pushing legibility and readability.

I thought of his comment when a recent furor erupted over the new “house” font for Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), called Roboto. Roboto is a bespoke sans-serif font, created by a Google employee and used throughout Android’s user interface (UI) as part of the larger user experience (UX) overhaul. The intent is to make Android more intuitive, cohesive, and fluid, and work better on a variety of screen sizes, especially tablets.

Roboto was almost immediately branded a Frankenfont, a multi-headed hydra, and many other names by font purists and tyros alike, because of what seems to be a borrowing of identifiable features of several well-known fonts, including Helvetica. Stephen Coles at Typographica singled out characters he felt quite similar in form from Helvetica, Myriad, Universe, FF DIN, and Ronnia.

I was swept up in this as well. I glanced at the font, looked at various comparisons, and thought: What a shame that the opportunity to create something new and distinctive was lost. Roboto seemed to draw largely from the same well that Helvetica came from. Which was an odd choice, given that Apple had opted first for Helvetica for its iOS devices, and later (in iOS 4 for Retina Display devices) for Helvetica Neue, a set of improvements on the original.

But the longer I looked at Roboto, the less it seemed to me as nearly derivative, despite commonalities with other fonts. The designer, Christian Robertson, wasn't working in a vacuum. His design, directed by UX chief Matias Duarte, has to react to the constraints and abilities of Android hardware—at all the various screen sizes it will be available—and expand on the ways in which the previous system font, Droid Sans (created by Ascender's Steve Matteson), met UI and developer needs.

Carter said last year, "All industrial designers, and I consider myself one, work within constraints. Architects have to build roofs that keep the rain out and so on. It's particularly severe in the case of type designers, because what we work with had its form essentially frozen way before there was even typography. The Latin alphabet hasn't changed in a very long time," said Carter. (Carter declined to comment on Roboto in particular, but gave me permission to quote generally from last year's interview.)

Duarte echoed this in an interview conducted a few weeks ago. He said, about constraints around developing interfaces and fonts for new media, that "The important thing is each of the new technologies creates new boundaries for new types of expression. There are new tradeoffs. For everything that is lost, there are new possibilities."

The Feel of a Hand in an Iron Glove

Roboto is a sans serif—more technically a grotesk face with straight sides. Duarte has a neat essay on Google+ in which he sketches out the history of major type styles and defines Roboto's position within it. It's a good read and not necessary to repeat here at the same length.

Google supplied me with the full family (so far) of 16 faces to examine: a regular and oblique (the sans serif name for a slanted type that's not drawn differently, as with italics) of Light, Thin, Condensed, Bold Condensed, Regular, Medium, Bold, and Black. This warms the cockles of my typographer's heart, because with many different weights of a typeface, you can use differentiation to signify importance or meaning without having to rely solely on placement, size, or other faces. (The sign of a bad design is typically the use of many different sizes and faces. Find a great design, and you'll find remarkable restraint. The exceptions, which are legion, break that rule and prove it at the same time.)

The versions the firm supplied have hinting, or cues applied to the mathematical outline of each symbol or glyph that improve the conversion of the curve into a bitmap. It's unclear how much hinting is used by Android's font rasterizer, as Robertson noted in a comment on the Frankenfont blog post at Typographica that Roboto won't look at good in "older Windows browsers" because of a lack of certain kinds of TrueType hinting. Rasterization can be a CPU time sink, although TrueType (as opposed to PostScript) was designed to optimize that rendering.

What you notice first is that the uppercase is much more compact than the Helveticas. Helvetica tries to explore the full roundness of capital letters, with more than a suggestion of a circle. Roboto is ovoid, and trimmer around the middle. Are the flatter verticals in the C, D, O, G, and Q, and rounded corners supposed to suggest the proportions of a mobile phone? That's entirely too literal a reading, I'm sure.

Some of the bloodymindedness of Helvetica is gone, too. The G in Helvetica that reminds me of Peter Griffin's face from The Family Guy is no Kirk Douglas in Roboto, where it has a pert little chin instead of that giant block. The Q's violent diagonal slash in Helvetica is just little stroke akimbo in Roboto.

The lowercase also appears more condensed in the regular weight compared to the same weight of the Helveticas—but there's a trick. I was comparing the fonts continuously side by side, and something bothered me. Then I realized: they have nearly the identical average metrics when set in lines of copy rather than looked at overlaid on one another. That is, for a given length of upper-and-lowercase text at the same point size, Roboto occupies almost exactly the same horizontal space as Helvetica Neue.

The reason is the additional spacing around the letters. It is slight, but it adds up, and the face is designed to have a little openness when viewing on screen. But that openness can't equate to a repetitive blandness. A typeface may not produce an even rhythm or the eye finds nothing to grasp onto, and the face may appear legible but be unreadable.

“One of the potential drawbacks of a grotesk font is that the structured evenness of the type can make it more difficult to read. We started by softening up the lower case letters, and then experimented with opening up some of the glyphs to get a more diverse rhythm. We found that by adding a little more diversity to the lower case the font become more readable.

The designers did this by varying the angles in the lowercase at which strokes end on curved letters, not on the purely vertical strokes. This may seem subtle, but examine a few fonts close up, and you'll see these differentiations immediately. Helvetica, for instance, squares off horizontal all the terminal ends of vertical curves in a, c, e, s, and so on. The horizontal curves end in perpendicular squared ends in the t, f, r, and the little tail on the a.

Robertson writes about this in a comment added to the Typographica post by Stephen Coles, cited earlier:

“It has been the hard and fast rule for sans serif types that the a, c, e, g and s must agree as to their angle of exit. Interestingly, this is not the case for serif types, and certainly isn't true for any kind of handwriting. It is common for the lower case ‘e’ to be more open than the 'a' for example. If there is a single story 'g' it will often remain open, or even curve back the other way (up until it forms a two story g).

That's what makes Roboto stand out. I don't find it entirely successful, but as Gypsy Rose Lee is asserted to have said in the eponymous musical about her, "You've gotta have a gimmick." Roboto isn't a humanist san serif, like Optima (a font I adore, by Hermann Zapf), with tapered thicknesses in straight strokes. But it still manages to reference handwriting, and to have the homunculi in our brains pull the right levers, even though it's below the level of perception for the non-typophiliac.

This lets Roboto have the evenness and spacing needed for onscreen rasterization, while preserving a tiny bit of the feel of the hand that makes a typeface seem created by human beings, not automatons. Duarte said in our talk that Roboto tries to preserve the physical feel of a hand writing letters. It's there; subtle, but there. It's why I like the font after living with it. I worry that as fewer people write well or write at all by hand, that that sense of the motion of a stroke disappears entirely.

Genuine Artificial Personality

Roboto has to establish a new personality for Android, one that's a distinct break with the past as Google puts all its efforts behind the unified single-platform-fits-all 4.0. Droid Sans was distinctive, but perhaps too playful and not as suited towards the more extensive and elaborate use of type in Android 4.0. A new font signals from the top that the experience will be different. (Whether that experience is better or worse is a different matter.)

For fonts designed for screen reading, "there's always a contradictory set of requirements," type guru John Berry said in an interview. John is a friend, colleague, and mentor, and the former editor of influential type journal U&lc. He spent the last several years, until recently, in Microsoft's font group. "One is you want it to be completely plain, generic, get out of the way; and the other is you want it to be distinctive. And they are directly in conflict with one another."

Roboto pricks at your sense of the familiar at first, but then, like a person you see passing in a crowd that you believe is a friend, and then on fully facing realize is a stranger, the font asserts its own identity. Duarte describes picking up an Android 4.0 phone and seeing Roboto as: "There he is, that old friend—that new friend, really—without having such a strong character that it really hampers the ability to communicate." It's a tricky balance to achieve.

This is what made Apple's choice of Helvetica, and later Helvetica Neue, particularly odd for iOS: it is one of the best-known faces in the world, and produces an implicit recognition that has nothing to do with Apple nor the device. The choice of using an off-the-rack font can't be pecuniary, because development costs are relatively cheap, whether the type family is designed by the ubiquitous Matteson of Ascender (who has had his hands all over screen-oriented fonts in recent years) or an in-house staffer.

That's relative to all the rest of the costs that go into an operating system, or even just the massive time sink of the user-interface design component. For a perfection freak like Steve Jobs, the fact that he didn't demand a perfect font for the task defies my limited understanding of him. Maybe he thought Helvetica was perfect. He's wrong, but maybe he thought that. (The existence and use of Helvetica Neue in later devices is the refutation.)

This reminds me of a story my design teacher Alvin Eisenman told in the 1980s, when I was studying graphic design as an undergrad at Yale. Alvin said he and other designers were approached in the 1950s by Reader's Digest to develop a new face for the magazine. (Alvin was responsible for training oceans of designers, including many influential type designers and typographers.)

He couldn't specify new kinds of paper or ink, and the design had to be conservative in the consumption of ink. Any tiny cost decision in production was multiplied by a factor of tens of millions of copies. But the magazine was willing to have large quantities of test type, cut in metal for machine setting, to get the right fit. Google has clearly chosen the Reader's Digest route; Apple tied its star to all of the connotations that arise from Helvetica. (Apple once also did terrible things to ITC Garamond.)

In Your Hands

Android 4.0 has to run on a variety of device resolutions, from the low 100s of ppi to well over 300 ppi. It needed a face that holds up at the lowest density, but also looks terrific the more pixels you throw at it in the same visual territory. The face has to almost have hidden richness, so that it is bland and readable at low density, and interesting (but not too much so) at higher density.

Further, Duarte noted, and you can see when you compare Android 2.x with 4.0, that the decision was made to use type rather than other elements, like symbols and icons. Images don't resize well unless they're vector art, which requires more time and effort to make work at varying sizes, and more computational power to render. Type is a simpler problem, already optimized, and which can be just as meaningful when small or large.

The first natively installed 4.0 phone, the designed-for-Google Galaxy Nexus, finally shipped December 14th, but 4.0 updates for older devices and other new hardware built for 4.0 may not appear until months into 2012. Those with some moxie can download and install Ice Cream Sandwich on existing hardware, too.

The proof will be in the device. All my talk in this article doesn't bring you much closer to knowing how Roboto on an Android phone, ereader, or tablet will hold up. The best type disappears as it fulfills its purpose. Google had a change to signal, and Duarte said, "We wanted it to be something designers could talk about." Roboto has surely achieved that goal.

]]>http://boingboing.net/2012/01/02/roboto.html/feed83Worst fonts everhttp://boingboing.net/2011/11/04/worst-fonts-ever.html
http://boingboing.net/2011/11/04/worst-fonts-ever.html#commentsFri, 04 Nov 2011 19:02:34 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=127842the eight worst fonts in the world. Comic Sans is not included on grounds of lifetime achievement, but Papyrus makes a good showing.]]>the eight worst fonts in the world. Comic Sans is not included on grounds of lifetime achievement, but Papyrus makes a good showing. The winner is London's 2012 Olympic Font, which fits in well with the event's draughtmanship-free "blowjob Lisa" logo and "default shapes in the freeware 3D program" mascots. Not every selection is sound: just how old do you have to be to remember why you're not supposed to like Souvenir? ]]>http://boingboing.net/2011/11/04/worst-fonts-ever.html/feed29The questionable birth of Times New Romanhttp://boingboing.net/2011/08/18/the-questionable-birth-of-times-new-roman.html
http://boingboing.net/2011/08/18/the-questionable-birth-of-times-new-roman.html#commentsThu, 18 Aug 2011 21:21:48 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=114291Here's some interesting history for font-heads*.

Times New Roman has, as we know, become the default type for everything from school term papers to magazines.

]]>Here's some interesting history for font-heads*.

Times New Roman has, as we know, become the default type for everything from school term papers to magazines. It's usually attributed to Stanley Morison, who "oversaw" the design for The Times of London newspaper in the 1930s. (Their previous font was, appropriately, Times Old Roman.)

Evidence found in 1987 — drawings for letters and corresponding brass plates — suggests that the real father of the font wasn’t a typographer at all, but a wooden boat designer from Boston named William Starling Burgess.Burgess is famous in his field for having designed inventive, beautiful yachts (including three that won the America’s Cup), planes for the U.S. Navy and Wilbur and Orville Wright, and some experimental cars.

But before he accomplished any of those things, Burgess — in 1904, when he was only 26 — had a brief and brilliant flirtation with typography. He wrote to the U.S. branch of the Lanston Monotype Corp. requesting that a font be made to his specifications. He planned to use it on company documents at his nascent shipyard in Marblehead, Mass. He penciled letters and mailed them in. Some work went into creating the font on the corporation’s end — a few brass plates of the letters were cut — but then Burgess abandoned the project to partner with the Wright brothers. Lanston Monotype tried to sell the fledgling font to Time magazine in 1921, but it declined the offer, and Burgess’ unfinished project, simply labeled “Number 54,” was shelved for more than half a century.

Burgess' plans were eventually used to create the font Starling. Today, the Times attributes Times New Roman to Morison and “perhaps” Burgess, which is about the best they can do with the available information.

It would be really interesting to know if Times New Roman were based on "Number 54" or if it was a coincidence. But time, and World War II, pretty much erased all the records that could have proved it one way or the other.

*You know what I love about BoingBoing? That I can be fairly certain there are more a dozen font-heads reading this.